Grabs from mobile phone footage posted on Youtube by a female onlooker showing a young Malaysian man initially being helped up, and then robbed, during the riots. Photograph: Enterprise news and pictures

Tariq Jahan

It was a heartbreaking detail from the worst of the week's events: Tariq Jahan heard a car accident in Winson Green, Birmingham in the early hours of Wednesday morning, and ran to help. "My instinct was to help the three people," he told reporters. "I didn't know who they were or if they'd been injured. I was helping the first man and someone came up behind me and told me my son was lying behind me. So I started CPR [cardiopulmonary resuscitation] on my own son, my face was covered in blood, my hands were covered in blood."

Haroon, his youngest son, was killed that night, at the age of 21: with him, two brothers, Shazad Ali, 30, and Abdul Musavir, 31.

"Step forward if you want to lose your sons. Otherwise, calm down and go home. Please," Jahan ended his statement. Chris Sims, the chief constable of the West Midlands, said the impact of this had been decisive. "Those words were so powerful, so heartfelt and so spontaneous and generous that I think anyone that heard them must have been moved. Certainly, anyone that felt that there was any mileage from continuing a cycle of violence in the name of those young men that died will have thought twice about it."

Beyond Birmingham, across the country, the magnitude and understatement of Jahan's sorrow seemed to puncture the aerated atmosphere.

Pauline Pearce

By the time she'd become an "internet sensation", Pearce was known, in the newspaper rubric, as a "grandmother and jazz singer". She looked a lot more like a jazz singer than a grandmother; her charismatic bearing, her rousing timbre, her vivid persuasiveness. As she said to a crowd of rioters on Monday night in Hackney, "We're not gathering together to fight for a cause, we're running down Foot Locker … If we're fighting for a cause, let's fight for a fucking cause. You lot piss me off." The fact that she carried a walking stick was puzzling; she didn't look like she'd need a walking stick, so maybe she was borrowing it for a preacherly gravitas (The Telegraph cleared this up: she has a slipped disc). In the end, though, what she said and even the way she said it was less important than the fact that she said it: the inspirational courage of standing in the middle of a riot, speaking truth to people who are already angry enough to be breaking things. She says she's embarrassed by the attention, now, which must be pretty common when you're an internet hit for something random, doing a hula dance in your pants, or falling off a sofa. But she's an internet hit because of her sheer mettle.

Monika Konczyk

If it wasn't the worst event, this was the worst image: with distressing resonances of 9/11, nothing quite expresses the savagery of a fire as well as the sight of someone jumping out of a window to get away from it. The firemen waiting below the rented flat in Croydon on Monday night look willing and hardy, but you'd still rather land on a trampoline, or better still, not have to jump out of window. The man who caught her was a passerby, named Adrian, from Romania.

Konczyk, 32, lives in Croydon, and moved to the UK from Poland a few months ago, to join her sister, with whom she is now staying. She works in a shop. She has been severely affected by the event, feels traumatised and has been unable to talk about it publicly.

Upinder Randhawal

Sky News mustered a reporter who was also a Clapham resident (Mark Stone) and a TV historian, Dan Snow, who sat on a looter to prevent further looting. But no broadcaster has had the impact of Sangat TV, a Sikh community TV station based in Edgbaston, Birmingham, and set up in 2010 by Ranbir Singh Attwal. The standout moment, among its compelling news coverage, particularly on Tuesday night, was when Randhawa was filming the police from a car, as they chased rioters. He offered them a lift, and moments later the perpetrators were arrested. For dramatic impact, that was peerless, but the station's stated purpose – "to spread peace, defend our faiths and educate people" – was, if anything, more acutely expressed in a film Randhawa had made earlier that day, of a group of Muslims as they learnt about the deaths of their three friends.

Ashraf Haziq

The 20-year-old Malaysian student was in the unenviable position of distilling the carelessness of the violence: he was knocked to the ground by a gang of young men, who broke his jaw, stole his bicycle and left him bleeding heavily from the mouth on Monday night in Barking, east London. But that's not even the worst of it: a passerby, Abdul Hamid, filmed the moments directly afterwards. Someone appears to help Haziq, who is sitting on the ground. As that man helps him up, another relieves him of items from his rucksack. Without wishing to be hyperbolic and start banging on about society's sick pockets, you cannot watch this and think it's a great moment for humanity.

But then, the great moments begin: a Twitter campaign launches a poll, for what nice thing we could all do for Haziq, as a kind of national recompense. Options included paying for his mother to come over and see him in hospital, buying him new stuff to replace what was stolen, paying his tuition fees. He didn't need his tuition fees paid because he's got a sponsor in Malaysia, but by the middle of Friday, the campaign had raised £20,000, which would cover everything else. From his hospital bed in Whitechapel, Haziq said he felt sorry for his attackers, and still feels great about Britain.

In the wake of the riots, British urban music has been accused of promoting a culture of entitlement. Here, Professor Green, Lethal Bizzle and Wiley describe a world that politicians have chosen to ignore – and explain how grime is helping to give it a voice